Other Lives
by Jessa L'Rynn
Summary: "You run, I chase. That choice was made for us a long time ago." But what if it wasn't? Other choices, other lives.
1. A Story of More Woe

**Other Lives**

_A Story of More Woe_

They're both so very young, a boy without a last name, and a girl without a first name, two children of a world where names are answers. Sometimes it feels like they're getting younger every day. The world around them is getting bigger and they're feeling smaller, and the only thing they have to cling to in all this is each other. They sneak away from their keepers and hide in quiet corners, in shadows so deep even they can't see each other unless they stay very, very close.

They don't mind the closeness, not at all.

They tell each other secrets, things they've heard, things they've learned, things they've wondered about. They're assembling a complex puzzle, just the two of them, trying to solve the mystery of life and the mystery of why their lives are mysteries. The boy is convinced they should be able to work this out. With her knowledge of the world, and his knowledge of just about everything, they should find the answers easily and understand them completely. The girl is quietly afraid of what the answers will be, what they will mean, for her with her murdered mother and absent father, for him with his dead or maybe stolen parents.

They do things they're not allowed to do in the outside world, eat candy, play games, tell truths. They steal every moment they can to be together. Sometimes, they don't even speak, they just sit together, safe like they aren't any where else in the world, and hold each other's hands.

The day their lips touch is the beginning of something. No one catches them: they're both too careful for that. After that, they always kiss when they're together. One day, they don't stop kissing.

One day, they don't stop with kissing.

It scares them, a little, how close they've ventured to the lines between the suspected and the utterly unknown. He understands the biology of it as a theory. At fourteen, they're both technically sexually mature, and there are biochemical stimulants as well as physical touches that account for the levels of arousal they both experience.

None of this explains the emotions. The boy, who can now take an average person's psyche to bits and duplicate it in a lab, somehow cannot manage to do a thing with his own. The girl's situation is no better. Everyone she loves leaves her, except this boy, and all she really knows of joy is as a leverage, as something to be taken from her.

The boy asks his mentor to explain. The girl passes on what her mother taught her. They pool their information, and know they're in love. They decide, boy genius and teenage queen, that they should wait, should be careful, until they are old enough to marry. They've been taught by polite, proper people after all, and this is what adults who are in love do, they've been told.

That goal makes things between them strained, painful, confused. They fight, they cry, they make up. He never even considers hitting her (one of her greatest fears) and she never even considers leaving him (a terrifying possibility to both of them). They are certain this proves their love true beyond all doubt.

If the adults around them are the sorts of examples they appear to be (bad ones), the children may be right.

The end begins the night she sneaks into his room with the news that her father is sending her away to school. She'll never be allowed to see him again; she'll be alone, too, without him. Before she goes, though, she wants to share everything with him. He thinks that she is right. They have time, a few days...

She doesn't want to wait a minute longer and he's a teenage boy. He comes around to her way of thinking with their very first kiss. The whole experience is lovely and heated and over way too fast. It's also awkward and brilliant and messy. They didn't count on the pain or the blood, but he's not called a genius for no reason. The second time is easier and slower and after the third, the girl is convinced about just how fast a learner the boy really is.

She slips away before the dawn, and the boy's mentor is horrified to find him with a vigorously bleeding nose. He pins the boy's day-long distraction down to having such a rude awakening.

She comes to him every night that week, and there are other times and places they find each other as well. They make love, youthfully, passionately, desperately. They're joining bodies, sharing hearts, merging souls. They know they're going to be separated at the end of the week, but as they approach that date, they come to realize that apart is the very last place either of them ever wants to be. There are too many unanswered questions around them to trust a world that separates them.

The girl begs her father to let her stay, begs other grown-ups to talk to her father. The boy has to stay quiet, but that mind of his, the fined, honed, and tempered weapon that it is, is focused solely on alternatives. He remembers how many times he's asked to be somewhere else, to do something else, to know someone else. He tunes in to that, and in to the mysteries that surround the lives they've lived here, the mysteries they've always studied.

He realizes the very last day, and she realizes it too, that they will not only be wrenched apart if they stay here. They'll both be destroyed, because this love is not what the people controlling their lives want for them. Her father has scolded her for human feeling before, just as the boy is only supposed to feel what other people feel.

They plan to leave, but they don't have the time or the knowledge to plan well. They simply ask their friend for the way out, and then they run.

It's just as well, because this way they never know what happened to them, never know that the greatest tragedy of their lives is that they aren't their lives at all.

There is one area of the grounds where orders are to shoot on sight. The sweeper doesn't question, just does his job. It's only after they stagger into the waning moonlight, bloody and broken, that he realizes what he's done. It's his job to serve and protect, not murder babies, so he turns from pursuer to rescuer.

They're too shocked to understand the last moments of their lives, the shots, the blood, the voices, the screaming. They huddle together under a tree, wrapped up in the only thing each of them has ever had in this world, his body providing meager shielding for hers as their blood mixes like everything else about them.

They don't know his mentor dies in that fight, or their friend, or Sam the new sweeper who will never know more about them than that they were too young. They don't know that Dr. Raines dies, too, but they probably would have been relieved to hear it.

All they know, because they are still so very innocent, is that they loved and they tried. Whatever else becomes of their enslavement, a girl with no first name and a boy with no last name die free.


	2. I Run, You Chase

**Other Lives**

_I Run, You Chase_

Jarod took a deep breath, then slipped through the shadows, a gun in his hand and adrenaline pumping at breakneck speed through his system. He was sure this was the way it had to be. He had simmed this a dozen times, Pretended it be sure, to be certain.

Miss Parker was sleeping, alone and vulnerable, utterly unaware of his presence. He would get to watch her wake, watch her stretch slowly for the sky, watch her dark lashes flutter on her fair cheeks as her eyes batted open. He would see the confusion in her eyes as she realized she was not alone, and then the shock when she realized it was he who attended her awakening. The fear would melt quickly into fury, into icy, indomitable rage.

She might try to call someone to assist her. Miss Parker inspired amazing loyalty in people. Even as she was mean and sarcastic, haughty and slightly terrifying, she was also a good person, and so incredibly kind. She hid it well, but people were still drawn to her. She hid everything, but he was the Pretender and he could see right through her. Plus, they had grown up together, so he knew her deeper secrets.

He reached the window of the room she slept in. He couldn't frighten her, so he didn't dare make any sound now. He had to be silent or she'd be warned, and possibly shoot him. At the very least.

The window latch turned on a well oiled hinge, probably kept up in case she needed to make a quick and silent getaway herself. The window eased up, an inch at a time, and it felt like it was taking years to get it done.

When that was finally out of the way, he hoisted himself up and through the window, silent and lithe like a jungle cat. She would never see this coming.

He approached the bed slowly, the woman's body unmoving beneath the blankets. With a grin, he leaned over her and, in a soft, crooning tone, murmured, "Wakey, wakey, Miss Parker." When he didn't get so much as a grumpy mutter for his efforts, Jarod reached out to touch her shoulder, to touch her.

His hand encountered softness, but it was the softness of piled cotton, not a warm body. The mound of covers he'd touched slipped with the slight pressure and collapsed. A net fell over his head and the Pretender was caught, trapped like a rat in a maze.

"Parker!" He shouted his frustration to the sky just as he noticed the black and white stationary paper in the jumble of fallen quilts. He wished vehemently that someone had taught him how to swear.

It was a picture of a cartoon animal of some sort. Its head was surrounded with hearts and its striped black tail seemed to be wafting a cloud of greenish smoke. He stared at it in confusion. Miss Parker had added a notation above it, which read "you", along with her note that said, "Nice try, Pretender."

On the back side of the card was a creature that looked somehow terrified and disdainful at once, and it appeared to be acquiring a painted white strip by climbing under a white fence. Jarod was baffled at this, as much as at the little note above it that said "me". This side of the card also had a message. "I run, you chase," it said.

Jarod hung his head, once more defeated. At this rate, he was never going to get the Chairman's runaway daughter back to the Centre.


	3. Another Angle

**Other Lives**

_Another Angle_

A scream shredded the silence of the Simulation Lab, followed by the harsh rattling of a chain. Then the threats began. The man in the straight jacket, mad-eyed and raging, fought against the chain that bound him to a wall. He pledged at the top of his breath to destroy everyone for this, to shred the Project, to bring the Triumvirate to its knees, to level the Centre so that not one stick or stone of it could be found. He swore he'd make them pay for capturing him, for keeping him from his family. He vowed swift and terrible vengeance for using him.

Behind the camera that captured all this, a quiet, hollow-eyed old psychiatrist watched. After a long moment, he turned the camera and, taking a deep breath, began. "He's been back in the Centre for three weeks now, and this routine has not broken once. He has been kept in a straight jacket - an admittedly outmoded means of subduing a patient - for his own protection. Any time he's been free, he's attempted to kill himself or any others he's been in contact with. Miss Parker's last visit seems to have calmed him only momentarily. Needless to say, he is being force fed."

The soft Belgian voice gave an audible sigh, and the older man dropped his face into his hands. "He never rests, and even drugged he has no peace from the demons that plague him. His mind is broken, no longer his own. It may be time to - at least consider - mercy."

"**Where is my father!**" the bound man shrieked.

High up in the Tower, as far above the Sim Lab as the Sim Lab was above the drainage ditch its reluctant inhabitant had been reclaimed from, the Triumvirate considered this footage with appraising, expert eyes.

"It's interesting the damage a little time away from his natural environment can do, don't you think?" observed the tallest member of the Triumvirate in a deep, sardonic voice.

"Strange," said another with wide eyes on the screen the three watched.

"Quite possibly having his thumb removed unhinged his mind," the first observed.

The third spoke in a low, smooth, cold purr. "The rest of the way."

"Oh, don't be cruel," said the first. The conclusion was delivered with a satisfied little smirk. "Let me do it."

"Justice," said the second, reverently.

"Indeed," the other two agreed.

"Are you going to visit him again?" asked the first. "After all, your visits... calm him."

The third gave a dark chuckle. "I might." After a moment watching the footage, the woman turned to the first and said, very seriously, "I recommend against mercy, Jarod. After all, he never showed any."

Jarod considered. "Euthanasia isn't moral," he said. He looked to the second. "What do you think, Angelo?"

The quieter member of the Triumvirate tilted his head, regarding the man on the screen through brightly sparkling blue eyes. "Mr. Lyle... broken," he said. And he smiled.


	4. Turning Point

A/N: This one is almost more of a plot bunny than a real "other life" but it had such possibilities that I really thought it belonged here.

* * *

**Other Lives**

_Turning Point_

_Alright, Sydney,_ Miss Parker thought, _maybe just this once I can take a chance._ She'd had no one to count on, cling to, rely on, no one but herself, not for a very long time, not since her mother had died.

But maybe she could, now. Maybe she had a brother, after all, in the form of her thumbless, crazy, sadist twin. He'd wept over their birth - she'd heard him. Maybe they should have been together since then.

She tried to imagine him hiding in the corners with her and Jarod and Angelo, tried to think of him sitting next to her at the ornate and untouched dinner table, knowing their father should have been home hours ago, knowing he would never come. Would brother Bobby have protected her? Or would she have become even tougher than she was now, from looking after him?

Oddly enough, the only realistic image was of a single moment in time. The Tower elevator bell chimed. The door opened. Miss Parker moved toward Mr. Lyle, her brother, as a alternate world presented itself, clearly and vividly, inside her head.

Shots rang out in her mind's eye, familiar shots while she shrieked for their mother, while a large, faceless sweeper held her back. Bobby - her twin, was smaller, faster, angrier. It was Sydney himself who caught the boy at the last possible second, before the last shot rang out, while Jarod got away from him on the other side, fought to get to her. It was Sydney who dragged them all away, Bobby shrieking with rage while his sister cried in pain and, for the first time, Jarod was allowed to hold her.

It was Bobby who fiercely informed their father that he blamed Dr. Raines, and would kill the man for this, eventually, and with his bare hands, too.

Miss Parker smiled. She liked that kid, that imaginary brother. Someone to silently adore and hate their father with, someone to disappear for hours with, someone to share secrets with, so she wouldn't have gone to Jarod, and wouldn't have bared her soul to him, and maybe wouldn't have... Never mind.

The point was, she had him now, and their father was up to something, and Lyle could share it with her, help her, and she could help him. They could work together, learn to trust each other. (She didn't want to say "like she trusted Jarod", but that didn't make it less true.)

Mr. Lyle was standing in the lobby, right in front of the Tower elevator, as Miss Parker approached. He had a wary but welcoming smile, his soap opera star looks complimenting her own runway model perfection. They would have stormed the world, the brazenly beautiful Parker twins, they could have conquered everything.

"There's something I need to discuss with you," she murmured, ignoring Sydney who had just appeared behind them. "It's about our father."

Lyle looked stunned and concerned, exactly like she would have expected a real person to look actually, concerned because the secretive old man was their father, stunned because she was admitting it. Their eyes locked, blue to blue, Catherine Parker's eyes.

There was a loud, lurid, unnatural bang, as a single shot rang out over the lobby.

Screams filled the air, people dropping, grabbing onto loved ones or leverage, the smell of Sydney's familiar cologne. Miss Parker, frozen, could only watch in a detached sort of utter bewilderment as blood bloomed like a rose from a hole she couldn't understand, suddenly there in Lyle's forehead.

Time froze as her blood thawed, fear and adrenaline a chemical cocktail that brought a tidal wave of comprehending rage. The light of secrets and life went out in the astounded eyes before her and then Lyle's body fell backwards - right into the elevator. There he lay, sprawled and broken, dead like his mother, fallen where she fell.

She'd had a brother, Miss Parker had. For two minutes, she'd had one. It was long enough, just long enough, to alter the fate of everything. It was just one gunshot enough to change the world.


End file.
